Mary

I bumped into Mary on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown, LA. Mary was originally from Yorkshire and has lived in LA for 30 years. She still had a thick Yorkshire accent but when I asked if she would ever go back home, she said ‘I’m never going back there, I love it here’. Before she retired, Mary ran a chain of video rental stores called ‘Twenty-Twenty’. She was in the city during the Earthquakes as well as the riots and was working in one of her stores when the rioting first broke out. She said it was surreal watching people sprinting past the store carrying bikes, microwaves and TV’s etc. - like watching a really scary version of the TV show ‘Supermarket Sweep’. Mary told her manager that they’d better get out of there so they locked up the store and left. The next morning they came back to a looted store. Every video was gone and the place was a mess. It took Mary a couple of months to reopen and restock, and she remembers standing behind the counter looking at the customers and thinking ‘which of you bastards stole all my stuff?’ She was angry. After a while though, people started to show up at the store looking sheepish and holding stacks of videos. They confessed that they’d stolen them during the looting and felt so guilty that they just had to return them. ‘They just got caught up in the excitement of it all’ Mary told me ‘they were good people but the riots had a strange effect upon them’ Mary said that she got about 25% of her stock back from apologetic customers. ‘I forgave them after that’ she said with a smile before heading off to her language class.